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Living Thing, Anna Tivel’s eighth album, was recorded against a pandemic backdrop. Featuring just her guitar and violin with long-time collaborator and producer Shane Leonard on everything else, the songs look to explore and understand the seismic shift in everything that had been taken for granted. As such, it opens with the sweeping, pulsing Silver Flame where she sings, “Satellites and angel voices/yesterday tried to destroy us/ morning came up golden anyhow/ maybe there’s a great creator/ a far off planet trying to save us/but we’ve just got each other for now”, seeking, with an allusion to aliens coming as saviours and then swiftly leaving, “the silver flame I read about”.
From fantasies of visitors from another planet, she shifts to Real Things, an electric piano-backed, gently tumbling folksy melody that captures pandemic anxieties (“woke up the world was heavy, bright lights, blue and red/can’t fight the place we’re headed, can’t dream at two am/the neighbors are trying to party, hell bent on staying trashed/lynette and skinny charlie, passed out inside the van”), wanting to make a vicarious getaway (“the tv is interstellar, i go places from the couch/across the open water, escape to someplace else”), dreaming of how “someday i’ll fly the ocean, someday i’ll play a show” but finding herself locked down mentally (“bright lights, in a dark room, i thought, i could fly through all these feelings, all these real things without needing anyone”).
That scenario continues into the synth wheezing, whisperingly sung Bluebird, a survivor’s song of sorts (“summer’s almost over, we made it to September/living off of tv, the twisted lives of others/trying to find the brightness, in a world of dying embers/walking late at night with all the junkies and dead flowers”) and while “terrified to ask and anyway there is no answer”, the sense of sitting it out (“the promise of another day beyond the daylight, we’ll wait for it together”), the bluebird a promise of a new dawn, “the great beyond or something”, even if “we haven’t found it yet”.
Fingerpicked with woodwinds, the hushed Kindness of a Liar arrives at the place where, like the bedtime stories told to alleviate a child’s fear of the dark, a quasi post-apocalyptic fantasy of the truth provides comfort (“open up the window, tell me there’s a flower/every shade of yellow, shining in the rain/tell me there’s a rainbow, up above the houses/turning all the dark clouds, into sky again …tell me that we’ll make it, back to where we started or at least to somewhere, other than here”) as she sings “i need something better to believe, so lie to me… to fool the burning fear”.
It’s no surprise to find the next track is titled Desperation, a wobbly rhythm bubbling along as she returns to the theme of imagined escapes (“close your eyes and go somewhere, the windy coast, the forest floor an airplane, another world, a dream/real life is far from fair, you tried and tried and got nowhere/it’s like somebody rigged the whole damn thing”), a number about anxiety and depression (“bloody knuckles, empty hands, you want to fight …battling a thousand walls, you want to climb but all you ever saw is desperation”) that transcends a simple pandemic explanation.
Apparently born from a dream about eyeballs getting free, the musically perky Disposable Camera turns its lens on a communal floundering in the confusions and contradictions of living in the world (“before you come into the world, you should know/there are things that will hurt and things that won’t/like scraping your knees on the asphalt/and the freedom right before you felI”) where “nobody tells it like it is/they say don’t rock the boat and shut up kid but that big black train is rolling and that deep down scream is growing”. But while “you’ll stumble around til the walls collapse/a bird hitting hard on the mirrored glass/looking for something in someone else”, ultimately “you learn how to breathe just by doing it/how to dream until you believe yourself”, the song ending in a victory cry of “they say don’t blow around on a different wind but you’re gone and you’re not even listening/they were wrong and the wind is a living thing and you’re taking a picture you won’t forget /something real and the way you remember it/you’ll be everything, you’ll be riotous/what a feeling to be alive”.
Waltzing to a musical box melody, Two Truths again plays with paradoxes (“you feel so sad and you’re dancing/you’re smart and you don’t know the answer”) and grasps the possibility of change in the face of the odds (“we’re kinder today than we once were and hate is alive like a cancer/we’re trying, and we can try harder”) because that is the flux of living (“the record is forever changing/the whole damn thing is in motion and you are at the beginning”).
After all the anxiety and neurosis, the album heads to close with a sense of calm, acceptance, and putting your house in order with more Mac colours in the catchy folk-pop Altogether Alone (“don’t be afraid as you’re walking away in a quiet like you’ve never known/everything changing and all of these strangers are altogether alone/call up your brother, and tell him you wanted to be there the last time he flew to visit the family but you were still angry and man you’d go back if you could”). It finds her returning to the pandemic feelings of commonality and its impact (“don’t be afraid, there’s a feeling of safety, in knowing your struggle is known/everything changing and all of these strangers are altogether alone/alive in the wake of a powerful wind, you will never forget how it moaned/everything changing, again and again, and it changes everyone at the same time running altogether alone”.
It ends spinning out the six-minute Gold Web, the opening field recordings of wind and waves leading into a final pandemic-fuelled juxtaposition of both acceptance (“if you were a tall pine, in an old park, leaning or some bright flower dying, a wild rose, an iris/if you were an airplane, or the clear sky, or the jet stream/then you wouldn’t have to ask why”) but also of questioning your and life’s purpose (“out there in the tall grass, a bright future, you can build it but still you will have to ask why…under every eyelid, every heartbeat, every white rib is someone who is asking why”).
Understandably, Anna Tivel describes ‘Living Thing’ as her most melodic album – the rhythms riding waves of anxiety, resilience and hope, surfed with her soft, whispering and intimate vocals and washing up on a shore that ultimately looks out to the light on the horizon rather than the darkness behind.
Living Thing is released May 31, 2024, on Fluff & Gravy Records
